


Quiet with the Rain

by Linden



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Pre-Series, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 21:18:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2125014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/pseuds/Linden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean can spot an undercover cop at thirty paces, a hooker at twenty, and rims that will match his baby's at ten. But the fact that his little brother is in love with him--that, he can't see worth a damn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quiet with the Rain

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授权翻译】Quiet with the Rain/雨中静默](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4851329) by [Milfoil_c](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milfoil_c/pseuds/Milfoil_c)



> Just another younger Sam-and-Dean bit that's been lurking for awhile. The title hails from Gregory Alan Isakov's _Raising Cain_.

**June 1996**

The thing about highways, Dean had long since discovered, was that they encouraged you to dream.

It’s not like he would ever have admitted that, of course—not to his father; hell, probably not even to Sammy. But God knew that you had to do something to while away the hours and days and miles, and there were really only so many rounds of I Spy or Twenty Questions or Name That Monster that any sane person could be expected to play without _cracking_. Tucked up in the back seat with an entire freakin’ library of bought, borrowed or stolen paperbacks, Sam could, between one breath and the next, lose himself utterly in his books; Dean just tipped his head against the window to watch the light poles—or the cows, or the cornfields, or the desert, or the sea, or oaks dripping with Spanish moss or old maples alive with autumn color—and let any number of daydreams, bright and fragile, kaleidoscope across his mind. He held onto some of them for days, some for months; some, like a small midwest garage with WINCHESTER CLASSIC CAR REPAIR stamped on the sign above the bays, or the sudden appearance of a roadside diner with hot apple pie, or a threesome with hot twin cheerleaders, had been with him for years. But the oldest and fondest of all of them, cherished from the age of four and a half to seventeen, was this: one day, John Winchester was going to drive away having told him _where the fuck he was going._

‘Bobby, you sure you don’t mind?’ Dean asked, frowning, as he watched his father vanish into the muggy grey morning on a long, cool gleam of black and chrome. Sam was already halfway to the house, Bobby’s mutt frolicking happily around his legs; the kid had tumbled out of the back, hair in his face, almost as soon as Dean had stopped the car. ‘Seriously, Sammy and I can grab a room somewhere if you—’

Bobby was looking at him with mild curiosity. ‘All those concussions finally catching up with you, kid?’

‘I just—’

‘Dean, the day you and your brother ‘grab a room’ anywhere within two hundred miles of this house will be the day I am salted, burned, and buried,’ Bobby told him, gruff and grumpy and affectionate as always. ‘Don’t be an ass. You boys are always welcome here, you know that.’ He tossed his head in the direction of the house. ‘Get yourself settled already. You and Sam need anything in town before ten, you can take my truck, but I need to be in Mitchell by eleven-thirty. I’ll be out back until then if you need anything.’

‘Thanks, Bobby.’

Bobby waved a hand at him over one shoulder, already heading back to the shed; Dean glanced once more in the direction his father had vanished, then shouldered his duffel and went inside. He made a brief inspection of the kitchen cabinets, winced, and went jogging lightly up the stairs to duck into the dim cool room he and Sam always shared at the end of the second-floor hall. The shades were still drawn, and Sam was already starfished on his stomach across the big bed, face pushed into the pillows; tossing his duffel into the corner, Dean smacked his brother’s still-sneakered foot and got a pitiful whine in reply. ‘Come on, Sleepin’ Beauty. We got shit to do before naptime.’

Sam made a muffled sound Dean was fairly certain was meant to be _fuck off_ , but which came out more as _frrrrff._

‘You send me to Walmart on my own, Sammy, and the only green thing I’m comin’ back with is mint Oreos,’ he warned, and grinned at the outrage suddenly visible in the tense muscles of his brother’s back. ‘And lime jello. And hey, maybe some of those green-frosted cupca—’

Sam rolled over to glower at him through the shadows. ‘You think you’re so funny, don’t you.’

‘I am fuckin’ _hilarious_ , and you know it. Now c’mon.’ He smacked Sam’s foot again. ‘Up and at ‘em. You can choose all the cereal, okay? And whatever green shit you want.’

Sam kicked weakly at his brother’s hip. ‘Can’t we go later?’

‘Bobby needs his truck later. And we need groceries now, ‘cause Bobby’s pretty much got a pop-tart and an old can of coffee in the kitchen. So. Move your ass, princess.’

Grumbling, Sam knuckled at his eyes like a five-year old, but he moved his ass all the same, trailing after Dean into the hall and down the stairs and out to the yard, where Bobby’s mutt had to be dissuaded from joining them and Sam had to be dissuaded from allowing the mutt to join them and they eventually got their asses into Bobby’s truck. Dean had it in gear when he glanced over at his little brother to ask whether the kid needed deodorant or socks or anything, got his first good look at Sam’s face in the grey morning light, and knocked the truck back into park. ‘Sam, Jesus Christ.’

Sam blinked at him, the hollows beneath his eyes so shadowed they looked bruised. ‘. . . what?’

‘Dude. Did you even freakin’ sleep last night? You look like you got run over by a semi.’

Sam flushed, shrugged, and said nothing, looked out the passenger window at Bobby’s sea of cars. He _had_ slept, Dean was certain of it; he’d checked the rearview mirror every time they’d crossed beneath a street light on the drive last night (which was, like, maybe four times, the back roads out here being what they were, but still) and Sammy had always been curled up in a motionless lump beneath Dad’s jacket in the back. Though it occurred to him, now, that Sam had been lying with his back to the front seat, which meant he’d never seen his little brother’s face. ‘Sam. Seriously. You all right?’

Sam looked down at his hands, still scabby with scrapes from Maine. The bruises on his arms were still dark enough that despite the humid early summer heat he was wearing a long-sleeved tee, old and tissue-thin; Dean was pretty sure it had been his, once. ‘M fine. I slept. Some. I just . . . I woke up a lot.’

Dean said nothing, just looked steadily at him for a long moment. Sam didn’t meet his gaze. ‘You havin’ nightmares again, little brother?’ he finally asked.

Sam shrugged.

‘Sam, I swear to God, you shrug at me one more time—’

‘Yes, okay?’ he snapped, and then pushed his hands though his hair and threw his head back against the seatback. ‘I didn’t—’ He sighed, squeezed his tired eyes shut. ‘I’m sorry. Dean, I didn’t—’

‘S all right.’ He didn’t look away from his brother. Occasional bad dreams after bad hunts were nothing new for any of the Winchesters, their father very much included, but Sam had had a particularly vicious run of them a week ago after the clusterfuck that had been their hunt up near Bar Harbor, and if Dean never again woke to find his brave, competent, fiercely independent baby brother wet-eyed and shaking and dry-heaving over the toilet at two in the morning, that would be A-OK by him. ‘Why the hell didn’t you say somethin’ last night?’ Dean finally asked. ‘I could’ve at least turned the radio on for you or—’

‘Didn’t want Dad to know,’ he said, quietly.

Dean rubbed an absent hand over the steering wheel, well-worn leather warm against his palm, because yeah, okay, he got that. But—‘You still dreamin’ about Maine?’

Sam looked down at his hands again. ‘Yeah.’

‘Sammy—’

‘Dean, please, c’n we just—can we not, right now? I just—I’m tired. I’ll sleep a little on the way to Walmart, okay? And then when we—when we get back. Please.’

Dean looked at him for a moment more. ‘You wanna just go back in and lie down?’ he asked. ‘I’ll get you salad and chicken and shit at the store, Sammy; you know I will; I was just—’

‘No, I—’ Sam flushed. He had the sleeves of his tee pulled down over his hands now, fingers twisting in the fabric; he wouldn’t look at Dean. ‘I wanna stay with you,’ he said, softly, and Dean remembered, then, that as quickly as the kid had tumbled out of the car when they’d arrived here, he’d done so only after Dean had told him he’d be following him inside in a minute.

Sam was holding himself stiffly, cheeks a bright, helpless pink, eyes fixed on his lap, waiting for Dean to tease him.  And Dean thought about doing precisely that for maybe one sixty-fourth of a second, but ‘Yeah, all right,’ was all he said—because yeah, sure, he was frequently a jerk and a jackass, and he knew that, but he wasn’t _that much_ of a jerk and a jackass, at least not to Sam. He put Bobby’s rattle-trap of a pick-up into drive and piloted it out of the salvage yard, and Sam leaned his head against the window, wearily, and closed his eyes. Dean left him alone for approximately forty-five seconds, until the second time he heard the kid’s skull thunk against the glass on a bump, at which point he reached over, eyes still on the road, fisted a hand in the back of Sam’s collar, and pulled him across the seat. Neither of them spoke. Even with the air conditioning blowing sullenly from the vents, it was too muggy out to be pressed together like this, it really was—but Dean kept his arm around his little brother’s shoulders anyway, and Sam didn’t move away, just pulled his legs up and tucked his dark head against Dean’s chest the same way he had ever since he’d been little, and he was asleep before they were three minutes past the edge of Bobby’s yard.

Dean took a roundabout route to the parkway, kept his speed down and took it easy around the turns, and Sam stayed slumped against him, sound asleep, his breath _whuffing_ gently across Dean’s collar bone. It was nearly thirty minutes before they pulled up to the big Walmart, and Dean pulled into a spot beneath a scraggly tree, cut the engine, cranked down the window, and sat there quietly for another fifteen before he woke his little brother, who was groggy and bitchy but already looking considerably better for a brief nap. He shuffled alongside Dean up and down the aisles, piled what Dean was pretty sure was every fucking vegetable in the state of South Dakota into their grocery cart, declared that Hormel chili was not a food group, insisted that Dean had _promised_ him mint Oreos, and then sat with him on the hood of Bobby’s truck when they were finished to share a quart of milk and a discounted two-day-old turkey-on-rye they’d grabbed from the deli with the last of their cash. Sam went diving through their loot to find the Oreos once they’d finished, hopped back up on the hood of the truck once he’d found them with a dimpled grin, and the two of them sat passing the tray and the milk back and forth between them for awhile, watching the slow Tuesday morning Walmart crowd go by. Dean raised a sardonic eyebrow at the mothers who looked at them disapprovingly on their way in to the store. Because for the love of fuck, if his kid wanted to sit on the hood of a truck and eat half a sleeve of Oreos at nine in the morning while drinking milk out of the carton, Dean was damn well going to let him sit on the hood of a truck and eat half a sleeve of Oreos at nine in the morning while drinking milk out of the carton —and if the Nosy Walmart Shoppers Association of America didn’t _like_ it, they could go take care of their _own_ ghouls and witches and restless spirits from now on, thank you very much.

‘Dean?’

‘Mmm.’

Sam’s voice was wistful. ‘Dad say where we’re going next, when he gets back?’

Dean shook his head, swallowed. ‘Not for sure, kiddo.’ He traded his brother the Oreos for the milk. ‘West, though, I think. He had a line on somethin’ weird in a copper mine near Ely.’ He bumped his shoulder companionably with Sam’s. ‘Nevada’ll be fun, yeah? We haven’t been on 50 for awhile.’

‘You have an unhealthy relationship with that highway, Dean.’

‘Yeah, well, ‘s an awesome highway, little brother. And it’s been, like, two years since we’ve seen the Shoe Tree, anyway. We can’t shun the Shoe Tree, man.’

Sam’s mouth quirked, sweet and wry. ‘Still pretty sure we’re supposed to _leave_ shoes there, not take them.’

‘Dude. They were not doin’ that tree any good. Us, they did good. Besides, these days? I see shoes in Jolly Green sizes, I'm gonna grab ‘em. Off other people’s feet if necessary, and definitely from a freakin’ _tree_.’

His brother’s pretty face creased in a scowl. ‘My feet are not that big, Dean.’

‘You could share shoes with Ents, kiddo. Which is why if we see any Ent-size boots or sneakers out there, they are goin’ in the trunk. Now c’mon.’ He slid off the hood, grabbed the front of Sam’s tee and pulled him down after him, took the half-empty tray out of his hands. ‘Take the cart down to the return thing, okay? We gotta fill up the tank and get back. Bobby needs the truck by ten.’

It had been a couple of days since he’d gotten a good bitchface out of his baby brother; he was beginning to worry Sam had forgotten how. ‘Why don’t _you_ take the cart down to the return thing?’                                                                      

‘Cause I’m older, and I bought you Oreos.’ Dean grinned. ‘And ‘cause Dad left me in charge, and I _said_ so. So move it.’ 

‘Jerk.’ 

‘Bitch. Go.’

Sam went. Dean climbed back into the truck and got the engine turned over, watched his little brother step up onto the back crossbar of the cart and ride it like a scooter most of the way down to the cart return, and met him halfway back up the lane. Sam stayed awake and on his side of the seat on the ride back to Bobby’s, sipping at the last of the milk, and neither of them said another word about nightmares until they’d washed up the breakfast dishes Bobby had left in the sink and scrubbed down his counters and stove and were almost done putting the groceries away in the cool dim comfort of the house.

‘Dean?’

‘Yeah.’

‘ . .  . you gonna tell Dad?’ Sam asked, quietly, folding their paper bags neatly for the trash.

Dean snorted. ‘’Bout what? You pullin’ those puppy-dog eyes on me in the middle of a South Dakota Walmart to get me to buy you _plums_? Yeah. Sorry, kid, but you’re not livin’ that one down anytime soon.’

‘Dean.’ Sam’s voice was unsteady. ‘You know what I mean.’

Dean looked around at him. ‘Am I gonna tell Dad that you’re still havin’ nightmares about the eight-foot mutant Chewbacca zombie that attacked us two weeks ago in the middle of freakin’ Narnia, you mean? No, Sammy.’

Sam’s mouth twitched, reluctantly. ‘Acadia.’

‘What?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘It’s called _Acadia_ , Dean, not Narnia, Jesus Chri—’

‘Yeah, well, whatever. It looked like Narnia, all right? Friggin’ . . . trees, and shit. Don’t tell me you weren’t lookin’ for Mr. Tumnus.’

‘Oh, my God, you’re just never going to let that go, are you?’

‘Sam my man, I found you wanderin’ around the woods with a thermos of tea and a flashlight, lookin’ for a goddamned faun to have a tea party with. No. No, I am not lettin’ that go anytime soon.’

‘Dude, I was _nine_.’

‘Uh-huh. Remember how you wanted Dad and me to call you Samuel Son of Adam for a week?’

Sam was trying very hard not to smile. ‘Would you shut up?’

‘And Dad had to, y’know, remind you that your name isn’t actually Samuel?’

He lost his battle with his grin. ‘Shut _up_ , Dean.’

Dean grinned back. ‘You gonna make me?’

‘You are such a _child_ ,’ he whined, and Dean waggled his eyebrows at him before turning back to deal with the last of the groceries. He leaned over the sink to pop open the windows first; it was starting to rain outside, a soft steady patter of grey, and both of them loved the smell of it in summer.

‘Sammy, dreams are nothin’ to worry about, okay?’ he said, emptying out their final bag. He tossed two boxes of Ritz knock-offs up on a high shelf, chucked a head of cauliflower—Jesus, _a head of cauliflower—_ at Sam to put in the fridge, stacked the boxes of cheap pasta neatly on the lowest shelf. ‘You know that, man. Things just stick with you sometimes for awhile. So eight-foot mutant Chewbacca zombie stuck. Bitch’ll shake loose eventually. Just . . . wake me up if you start dreamin’ again, all right? If you need to. ‘S not a big deal.’

Sam said nothing for a long moment. Then, softly: ‘Was a big deal.’

‘Mutant Chewie? Nah, kiddo. Just another day at the—’

‘Dean, it nearly killed you.’

‘Yeah, well, it didn’t, because I am a friggin’ _ninja_ , and also because I’ve got a badass little brother who put a knife through the fucker’s eye. So—’

‘But I could have _missed_.’ Dean looked around, sharply, at the sudden hitch in his little brother’s voice; Sam was looking down at the floor of Bobby’s kitchen, hands shaking where he had them fisted by his sides. ‘Dean, it was so dark and everything happened so fast and I . . . I could’ve . . . I could’ve _missed_ it and hit—I could’ve _hit_ —’

Dean was already moving, was across the kitchen in three long strides and inside his little brother’s space, worry twisting up sharp and sudden in his chest. ‘Hey. Hey hey hey. Sam. Sammy. Look at me. Hey.’ He tilted his brother’s face up with a warm hand on the side of his neck. ‘S okay, little brother. All right? Take a breath. You’re okay.’

Sam nodded once, jerkily, and looked down at his toes again, eyes wet. He plucked at the hem of Dean’s tee shirt with long fingers, like he’d used to when he was a little kid; Dean wasn’t entirely certain his little brother was even aware that he was doing it. _I could’ve . . . I could’ve missed it and hit—I could’ve hit— _

Oh, Jesus Christ, no.

He brought his free hand up to grip the other side of Sam's neck, gently. ‘Sam.' He couldn't see his little brother's face. 'Sammy. Hey. That what you been dreamin’ about, kiddo? That the knife hit me instead of zombie Chewie?’ 

Sam stayed silent for a long moment. Then, soft and so unsteady and thoroughly wretched, came: ‘Your throat.' Sam swallowed, convulsively. 'There’s always so much blood.’

‘Sam, look at me.’

Sam looked up at him, slowly, tired eyes miserable with exhaustion and worry and something Dean couldn’t quite recognize, though his stomach inexplicably tightened, just a little, at the sight of it, and something sharp went fizzing through his blood. ‘M right here, little brother,' he said, steadily. 'Walkin’ and talkin’ and buyin' you plums and friggin' cauliflower, okay? Everything’s all right.’

'But it’s not.' Sam sounded small and lost and roughly five years old, and Dean felt his heart give a painful twist behind his ribs. 'It’s _not_. I don't—Dean, I don't—' His voice cracked, just a little; he ducked his head, forehead bumping against Dean’s collarbone, thin fingers tight in the thin cotton of his shirt.  'I don't want us to keep doing this,' he managed at last, speaking softly to their toes. 'I don't—I don't want nearly dying to be this thing that we do, okay? And I don’t want us to keep _moving_ all the time; I just wanna go back to Maine, and just—just _stay_ there, and I just—I don't—' He blew out a shaky breath, started to say something, then shook his head a little and shut up, as though there were too much _don't_ for him to find words to fit.

'Tell me,' Dean said, rubbing at the back of his neck. And then, correctly interpreting the miserable line of tension across his shoulders: ‘Sammy, whatever it is, I’m not gonna be mad, okay? Tell me.’

Sam said nothing for the space of several heartbeats, the only sound in the kitchen the gentle hiss and patter of the rain. Then, tentatively: ‘I just . . . I don’t want to be a hunter, sometimes,’ he said, voice so quiet Dean wouldn’t have heard it had Sam not been so close. ‘Wish we didn’t _have_ to be hunters just because—because Dad thinks we . . .’ He looked up, his sweet face tired and unhappy and filled with a sort of quiet desperation. ‘Don’t you ever want anything else? Want to _be_ anything else?’

A memory surfaced, sudden and bittersweet and unbidden: _I wanna be a rockstar—but I also really like cars._ Dean smoothed his brother’s hair back and said nothing for a moment, swallowing past the sudden tightness in his throat. He’d rarely thought about Sonny’s this past year—he’d rarely _let_ himself think about Sonny’s this past year—because he’d made his choice, and he was going to make it again, as often as he had to, until the day he dodged left instead of right, or reached for steel instead of silver, and ended up with his brains a bloody slurry on the floor. Hunting was his life, was always going to be his life, and he was okay with that. He’d made his peace with that. But he was fucked if he knew how to explain any of that to his brother, who was looking at him with an expression not dissimilar to the one he’d worn at five years old, when he’d realized half an hour out of Belle Plaine that he’d left his teddy tucked into the bed John had pulled them out of at 3:00 AM. Dean hadn't ever really forgiven their father for refusing to go back for it.

‘What would you be, Sammy?’ he asked quietly, instead of answering. He rubbed a calloused thumb along his jawbone; Sam’s eyes fluttered shut, briefly, before he flushed and tucked his head back beneath Dean’s chin, where his brother couldn't see his face. ‘Hmm?’

He was silent for a minute. ‘Don’t know,’ he whispered finally. And then, shifting to twine thin arms around Dean's ribs: ‘Something else.’

Dean ghosted a hand up over the tousled mess of the kid’s hair, tucked it behind his ear, rubbed at the bony knobs at the top of his spine with his palm, wrapped his other arm around his brother’s thin shoulders.  Neither of them spoke for a little while, curled close around one another in the dim quiet of Bobby’s kitchen. Dean had seen Sam upset about hunting before, more times than he could count, had seen him sulky about hunting and pissed off about hunting and the impressive Sam-Winchester-trademarked combination of the two, but he hadn't ever seen him like this, with something clearly broken open inside of him and bleeding, and he didn’t know what it was and he didn’t know how to _fix_ it. He kept Sam tucked in warm and close against his chest. ‘Where’s all this comin’ from?’ he asked, because it wasn’t just from their last hunt and a run of admittedly shitty nightmares; he was sure of that.

Sam shrugged.

‘Dude. You know I’m just gonna make shit up if you don’t tell me, right?’ Dean scritched gentle fingers through the curls at the nape of his neck. _I just wanna go back to Maine._ ‘Were you sweet on some girl in Boothbay, kiddo?' 

The noise Sam made against his chest might have been a laugh, had there not been so much despair caught up in it. His fingers tightened a little where they were tangled in the back of Dean's shirt. 'No,' he whispered.

Dean paused for a moment. Then, 'This one of those crazy adolescent mood swing things I never went through 'cause I'm so awesome?' 

Sam made a muffled sound that was half a snort and half an indignant squawk and so resulted in the deeply undignified noise of an outraged baby seal, but as far as Dean was concerned, outraged baby seals were a considerable step up from miserable baby brothers, so he was going to count it a win. 'We're not huntin’ anything for awhile at least, you know?' he offered after a moment, and he knew it wasn't much, he knew it wasn't enough, but it was the only thing he had, just now. 'Dad's not gonna be back until the middle of August, and until then you can just—I mean, we gotta train, Sammy, but we can see if there's a summer soccer league in town for you or somethin’, okay? And if not you can just read a bunch of geeky math books on the sofa and talk to Bobby in Latin.' Sam tipped his head back to look up at him, clearly unimpressed; Dean pushed his floppy hair back off his forehead. 'You could even get a haircut, which would be pretty fuckin' excitin' for everyone.'

Sam huffed a laugh at that, small and unsteady but genuine all the same, and dropped his chin again. 'Shut up,' he muttered, but Dean could hear the smile in his voice, even if he couldn’t see it. Sam was heavier against him now, some of the tension gone from his back and shoulders; Dean rubbed an absent hand along his spine and wished to high holy heaven he had something, anything, else to give him. ‘It’s not—I know it’s not always easy, kiddo, okay?’ he finally said. He was crap at talking about stuff like this, and he knew it, but it’s not like there was anyone else for his little brother to hear it from. ‘And I know—I know you’re not always happy, Sammy; I _know_ that, but it’s just . . .’ Sighing, he buried his mouth and nose in his brother’s hair for a moment, eyes closed, breathing him in, and felt something judder swift and sweet through his little brother’s body. He tightened his arms around him a little, thinking he was cold in the chilly air of Bobby's house. ‘It’s just what we got,’ he said, softly, and after a moment Sam nodded tiredly against his chest.  Dean let him lean against him for a long moment more, because Sam didn’t seem much inclined to move and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make him, then offered, ‘On the plus side? We also got hot chocolate now,’ and felt the soft huff of his brother’s laugh warm and damp through the thin cotton of his shirt. ‘You want a cup, Sammy?’

Sam nodded. Dean squeezed the back of his neck and stepped away from him; Sam dropped into a chair and pitched forward to pillow his head on his arms, face hidden in the crook of his elbow, shoulder blades showing bony through the worn cotton of his tee. Dean got milk heating on the stove, investigated the newly-full cabinets and fridge for potential Sam-friendly breakfasts (the half-sandwich and Oreos were half an hour in the past; Dean would eat his own socks if the kid weren’t already hungry again), and eventually settled on the pistachio-and-chocolate-chip ice cream already stashed in the back of the Bobby’s freezer, on the grounds that green things were, you know, good for you, and also that Sam had not refused ice cream since first discovering it at the age of two. He made Sam a mug of creamy cocoa and himself a cup of coffee, and then piled one of Bobby’s soup bowls high with ice cream, stuck in two spoons, and plunked both mug and bowl down in front of his little brother, whose eyes went gratifyingly wide at the sight. Sammy tipped his head back to look up at him. ''Cause this is healthy,' he said.

'Yeah, well,' Dean replied, fetching his coffee from the counter and pulling a chair around from the other side of the table. By the time they were halfway through the bowl, Sam had a foot tangled carelessly around Dean’s ankle beneath the table and was explaining, animatedly and at length, his theory about the proper ratio of sips of cocoa to bites of ice cream, and by the time he was demonstrating the best angle at which to tilt the bowl to slurp up the last of the melty ice cream at the bottom, Sam sounded like his Sam again, all snark and sass and sweetness, and there was a light again in his pretty hazel eyes. Dean booted him over to the sink to rinse out their bowl and mugs when they were done, looked out into the gentle grey morning with no enthusiasm at all. It was _wet_ out there now. And he knew his father would expect him and Sam to be out there anyway, would expect Dean to _get_ them out there anyway, but . . .

He debated for a moment telling Sam to grab some socks and shorts and his trainers when he was done cleaning up, and then went into the living room and _whumped_ down onto the couch instead. He was not, he reasoned, reaching for the remote, disobeying his father. They were just gonna count eating ice cream as their PT for the morning, that was all. Spoons had been freakin’ heavy.

Shuffling in from the kitchen, Sam face-planted onto the couch and curled up on his side like a little kid, his head tucked up near Dean’s thigh, close but not touching. Dean flicked past infomercials and a morning talk show (no), newscast (also no), televised evangelical church service ( _hell_ , no), and finally paused on a rerun of _Gargoyles_. A _marathon_ of _Gargoyles_ , in fact, if the tiny box in the bottom corner of the screen could be believed. He glanced down at Sam, eyebrows raised; Sam had already rolled his head to grin up at him.

‘Awesome,’ the kid declared.

Chuckling, Dean tossed the remote onto the coffee table, kicked his feet up beside it and settled comfortably in. And if his hand shortly thereafter ended up in his brother’s hair, stroking idle and slow through the soft, soft silk of it, well—Sam’s head was just in the way, that was all, lying right where Dean’s hand would have fallen had he been sitting here alone. The fact that at thirteen Sam still always tumbled into sleep more easily if Dean were close and more easily still if they were touching was just, y'know, it was irrelevant, is what it was.

‘Think Goliath could take down a werewolf?’ Dean asked him after a little while, rubbing gently at his brother’s scalp.

'Mmm.' Sam was already half-asleep, the petting and last night's sleeplessness and an incipient sugar coma ganging up on him like Dean had known they would, but he was nodding seriously, all the same.  ‘Goliath could take down _anything_.’ He paused, yawned. Then: ‘Cept maybe Uncle Bobby.’

Dean snorted out a laugh, tugged lightly on his brother’s hair. Said nothing else. Sam drifted off maybe five minutes later, breaths easy and content, and Dean sighed, quietly, looking down at him. 

Hunting was Dean's life, was always going to be Dean's life, and Dean really was okay with that. 

All the same, here in the dim quiet of Bobby’s living room, with the old lamp in the corner and the glow from the television and the rain coming down soft and gentle outside, he let himself dream that August would never come.


End file.
